Is misinformation subjective or objective?

Question

From what I understand, and I could be wrong, the government disseminates information that people consume. The government also tells us what is and is not true.

Now I am wondering, suppose theoretically that a committee of scientists knows every "Universal Truth". Then would the set of all propositions representing misinformation simply be a negation of this set of "Universal Truths"?

Generally, given that the flow of information in a society is often controlled, is publicly acknowledged misinformation or pseudoscience objective based on a non-biased standard? Could there be such a standard? Or is misinformation subjective?

Answer 1

Both. Misinformation is usually not just information that is incorrect, but it's "mis(leading) information", so it's the explicit or implicit accusation of deception.

A prime example for the difference is news media and science. Like if you are the first to cover an event, describe what's happening, what information are available to you and what is likely the cause, effect and consequences of something. Then there's a good chance that you'll end up being wrong. Things might be different than you initially thought they were and so the first draft of the report might end up being incorrect or "in need of correction(s)".

On the other hand there's value in getting information quick. Like it's often better to raise the alarm when you see dark smoke and be glad if it's just a BBQ, then to confirm it to the limits of reasonable doubt and have a school been burned down with all the children inside.

So that's not "misinformation" despite being wrong, that's the problem of "delivering information to the best of your knowledge" in combination with "not enough knowledge/information". You can mitigate that at least on your part by making people aware of your fact base and moderating your level of confidence accordingly. So instead of arguing that "it is" you say that "it could be". Then you're not proclaiming an absolute truth (which you couldn't really do in good faith anyway), but would characterize it as an assumption with a margin of error (which you'd name explicitly). So in that case you'd somewhat rid yourself of the problem of "being wrong", but you'd also lose the aura of "being correct" as well. It is what it is and time will tell what it's worth.

What would be misinformation is if you knew prior to the report that what you're about to say is obsolete, wrong, easy to be misinterpreted or even intentionally framed information. Then it's not just being wrong, the very purpose of it is to broadcast wrong information and to encourage/disencourage behavior or confidence in behavior that is/are not warranted by the facts.

And here it gets tricky because while it's not impossible to proof misinformation objectively. Like idk you can have video footage of Donald Trump proudly claiming the things that he only shortly after that claims never to have heard of. Or idk the CIA having reports prior to the claim of WMDs that state there's no intel on the existence of WMDs. So you can have high confidence that these people or institutions were lying and spreading misinformation at the time. However at the same time, it's also a subjective actions, like "misinformation" is not wrong information it's the intent to spread wrong information. So you can always argue that it's not a bad faith action but just being ignorant of the facts, bad at one's job, forgetful, just not very bright and whatever other reason would come to mind why you couldn't have known what you already know at the time.

So it's rather difficult to prove, to the last consequence, that someone is spreading deliberate misinformation.

That being said you can also look at the effect of information and see whether it IS misinforming people. So even without the malicious intent you can see the damage. So you can also act upon that and reevaluate the factfulness, show alternatives, expose framing and biases or downright mark it as false if there's sufficient evidence for that. And that can be done with a little more objectivity.

Like it's worth noting that absolute truths and perfect objectivity are likely unattainable, but that doesn't mean that you can't see obvious bullshit for what it is. I mean as said it's not just about being wrong, unjustified confidence given the facts can already count as misinformation.

Also the government usually neither controls nor spreads information. There are many channels of communication and distribution, from peer-to-peer discussions to broadcasting and usually the government is the topic of broadcasting not the source.

Answer 2

Misinformation is subjective in the wake of our own humanity. The following is not common within media and politics: but in psychology there are several methods used to mitigate bias when testing an idea or the actual existence of a human perspective. They use 60 or more people with various habits and age for testing to rule out bias as much as possible

It is not true, what the post modernists among others say, that there are no absolute truth; there are. But for a human to interpret something as 'truth' he or she needs to process it using their senses and those are, as psychology has correctly understood, not entirely to be trusted.

This sadly rules out AI as a solution because of the simple reason that we, the human interpreters, still need to process what they say. Watch human grandmasters react to the moves of the strongest chess engine in the world Stockfish for reference. Short analysis of that: They think Stockfish is 'weird'

The heavily politicized term 'misinformation' is an attempt by the powers of the world to handle the bias through social policy. The most correct response to misinformation would be to sit down and find out who everybody are in person first before respectfully interpret their analysis of the world. But that approach would sadly be to slow and to late for the harsh world of politics were, quite frankly, people almost tear the hair out of their opponents sometimes